The characters are rootless but not alienated, existentialism without the angst : Lucky Jim

"Lucky Jim" combines high literary style with schoolboy vulgarity to a great comic effect (at times, in certain scenes), in a way that's very typical of British lit - going all the way back to Chaucer in fact. Dixon waking with a hangover and facing the horrible (even by English standards) rooming-house breakfast - it's an almost Homeric accounting of what he drank and what he's faced with at the table. The almost brutal account of Margaret's breakdown in Dixon's room, where she howls in pain knowing he will never love her and gets revived by a few slaps and some whiskey. (I sense that, as she tells Dixon she's fine, all better, she will go off stage and kill herself.) Amis has a cruel humor, alleviated somewhat because he's cruel to his protagonist as well. Everyone's a schmuck. Obviously this novel was an was like a grenade hurled into the garden party of polite, boring British fiction. It's still funny, but with our distance from it, 50+ years, its age shows - not as funny, shocking, or unconventional as it must have seemed then, and a thin gruel compared with American fiction of its era. In a way, though, it's a precursor to that other great comic novel about a hapless schmo, Confederacy of Dunces, but Confederacy is a sad, rueful story because the character has a history and a family, and the eponymous Jim Dixon is an almost totally deracinated character, we know nothing of his past other than that he served in the Army and nothing of his roots. Kingsley Amis's characters are rootless without actually being alienated - a very English version of existentialism without the angst.